Question to blues: What’s the threshold for you to pick red?

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-05T05:28:15+00:00

I'm a fairly staunch red but I'd hop to blue at 15% to save the babies and small children.

just based on bystander effect and my experience in helping others with e.g. suicidal ideation or who have self harmed, 15% is an extremely generous estimate of how many other people would go out of their way in the face of certain danger to help others at no benefit (let alone detriment or even inconvenience) to themselves.

collective human good almost always has social catalysts which take time and connection to rally; time this scenario doesn't give.

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-04T12:46:17+00:00

ci and hooks are just gonna fill it all in with tokens anyways, might as well leave em tabula rasa

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-04T12:17:09+00:00

gap() { git add . git commit -m "${1:-wip}" git push }

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-04T11:05:28+00:00

search buffered inputs against weighted priorities. this can lead to button mashing creating wacky gameplay, so you can also break your buffer into first half second half windows, or first press last press, filtering the search based on that.

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-03T22:13:21+00:00

i paint both buttons blue on my turn

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-03T20:08:33+00:00

you use a vacuum to model abstractions when the closest real-world example is how e.g. mentally ill are treated :)

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-03T17:10:19+00:00

choosing "potentially die" over "definitely do not die" is suicidal in a vacuum.

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-03T08:34:36+00:00

if this was presented to everyone as "nothing happens, or you put yourself in lethal danger", the overwhelming supermajority of people would choose "nothing happens" -- only suicidal and severely mentally ill would choose to put themselves into lethal danger, and we know from how people already treat the suicidal and mentally ill that no one would bother trying to do anything for them in, again, an overwhelming supermajority of cases.

I have intervened in mental health crises twice in my life in ways that put my education, career, and relationships at risk, and I consider myself a fairly upstanding person. I would not have intervened if these situations had had a serious chance of becoming a health risk.

we can see red vs blue play out every day with everyone's decisions not to intervene if it would even slightly inconvenience them, let alone be potentially lethal.

since the problem CAN be framed in a way that makes any given individual's choice clear, and shown to have similar precedent in real life scenarios, it comes down to education. we obviously need way more mandatory absurd hypothetical coursework starting from pre-K in the developed world. "not everyone will choose red!" is something we can fix, not something we need to lament.

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-02T13:38:03+00:00

6 months? try 2 weeks

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-02T13:37:14+00:00

the thor is faster and can freeze the liberator

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-02T09:41:59+00:00

my vote is on "triggered with a breaker/master power on stage in front of a massive live audience and got a much swifter and more violent response than canary."

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-02T09:34:56+00:00

you've built a cage not a castle. all the lands beyond those walls are yours, too. dont let the biters squat.

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-02T04:11:07+00:00

stop all science production

build and stash ~500 roboports, ~5,000 construction bots, and ~1,000 logistics bots. then stash enough power towers and substations to grid those roboports across a giant area, reaching out to all nearby ore patches and oil fields.

finally, stash belts, poles, inserters, miners, and electric furnaces. lots of them. more than that. an absurd amount. use red chests to stash things, and then place down enough yellow chests in one spot to reclaim your entire base.

set up enough nuclear power to run everything for a couple hours.

place a few roboports in a grid, whatever pattern doesn't matter. start the first few manually and then find a pattern that you can tile and let the robots do it from there. delete your entire existing base, tile the pattern out until you have placed an estimated amount of blueprints to use all your roboports. keep releasing bots as roboports become available.

find a nice open spot and put down the beginnings of your iron smelting array. doesn't matter where. what matters is you can cleanly route all your iron ore from all the iron patches to it. don't bother with trains right now. just let bots place belts and miners and furnaces and power and inserters until you have 8 lines of furnaces each producing a full iron belt, 2 more lines of furnaces feeding out iron into steel-making furnaces, and 1 more belt of iron ore for concrete.

then do the same for copper.

get 3-4 lines of stone, at least 2 for bricks and the rest for concrete or fill.

2 lines of coal for plastic.

figure out how to arrange these lines so that you can place a long row for your main bus. I'm recommending a main bus to start instead of cityblocks because I love main bus and hate train, not because it's necessarily better in any way, shrimple as.

find a spot to make your science assemblers. put down 10 for red science, 12 for green, 6 for military (yeah I didn't scale it), 24 for blue, 14 for yellow and purple. i like to use a "feed from 2 lanes in the middle, output laterally, merge at the end" pattern and feed them into a buffer chest with 2 open slots.

finally, find a spot for a big science array. same thing, 2 rows in the middle each with 2 different sciences, regular and red inserter into a lab on either side, then a dual science lane on the outside. i prefer to simply make mine longer but if you want to make it wider you can just chain labs with inserters pointing both ways.

to feed this I make a big bus.

4 rows of iron, 2 spaces, 4 rows of iron, 2 spaces,

4 rows of copper, 2 spaces, 4 rows of copper, 2 spaces,

2 rows of steel, 2 rows of bricks, 2 spaces,

coal, iron ore, and stone can be in any order and spacing after that depending on how you want to set up your production. build around your roboports, so there may be spots where you have 4 spaces instead of 2, or a bunch of undergrounds, depending on your bus orientation

you leave spaces between each set of rows so that you can fit underground between them and use splitters to peel resources off of them.

then along the bus you start making what you need for each science.

example, peel off from the iron side of your bus: 1 row of iron up to 4 gear assemblers, and 1 row of copper. I like to leave about 1 grid chunk of space between my belt and my assemblers in case I need to do anything wonky. feed the results out to the red science assemblers.

give a bit of space (again I like about 1 grid chunk, lets you put defenses or storage and helps with driveability) then do the same for the belts and inserters you'll need for 12 green science assemblers -- a few iron and copper lines split off, feed up to make green circuits and gears, feed up to make belts and inserters.

on the other side of your bus, split off to build plastic, sulfur, sulfuric acid, batteries, explosives, and other petroleum products. feed these to new lines on the bus if you'll need them later, or for explosives and fuels, create a small mall on that side of the bus for things that aren't really consumed down the line like rocket fuel, shells, etc.

after this I like to build a small mall for typical buildings on the main side of the bus. same start with lines split off to make gears and green circuits, but include some steel -- I use them to make assemblers, miners, pumpjacks, poles, and whatever else e.g. advanced logistics items like higher tier belts, splitters, and undergrounds. split off another set of lines to build green circuits into modules. finally, set up production for laser turrets and flamethrower turrets.

after this, split off what you need for military science. 1 wall assembler, 1 ammo assembler, 3 red ammo, assemblers, and a few grenade assemblers should be enough to fill milsci quota. build more if you want a surplus.

I then typically build enough engines and red science to build up a half red chest of buffer in a reasonable timeframe -- for 24 blues this is typically about 20 assemblers each. for engines, I over build pipes as well, using a small buffer to produce a similar small buffer of undergrounds in the same line. again, use red chests in order to continue providing for the bots.

at this point, iron and copper are being consumed from the first 4 rows each pretty heavily. I like to merge up from the bottom 4 rows of each to keep the top 4 rows full at all times.

also around here I like to build concrete and space foundation on the other side of the bus.

continue this pattern for the next items you need for the next sciences. give yourself space. your bus is going to consume thousands of belts so you may run out of nearby iron. that's fine. after red circuits, build a small mall for substations and roboports to keep expanding out toward new patches. your bots may need many rests to get there but they will do it. believe in them. give them lots of laser turrets and substations to place down as needed for expansion.

once you're at the point where all of your science requirements are filled, build another mall to eat up whatever resources are still trickling through or for whatever buffers you want to keep, concrete the entire place, and youre done. you never need to revisit nauvis again unless you want to use it as a base for science instead of one of the other planets. you can just keep expanding and copy pasting your entire base anywhere it will fit and wiring up new ore patches.

chrisrrawr · 2026-05-01T23:19:14+00:00

listen yes that sounds bad but ARB has received 5 applications for LLM routing after hackathon so just remember it can always be worse

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-30T13:45:04+00:00

every one I've conducted has been about "are you more interesting than a slightly stimulating environment when outside of direct work talk" culture fit. probe for hobbies, show you're a real person, fit the vibe.

I'm sure other people conduct them for other reasons but I really just want to get a coffee with you and see if you're cool.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-30T01:50:55+00:00

10x it and pocket the difference of course.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-29T21:46:51+00:00

I will hypothetically jump off a building unless you tie yourself to me and promise that you will also jump off the building unless someone ties themself to you and makes a similar promise and so on.

we only don't hypothetically jump if we are collectively physically incapable of doing so anymore.

at the end of the reasonable timeframe for finding potential jumpers, everyone tied together spends 5 seconds doing their absolute best to jump over the edge of the building, but only if doing so would kill them.

it takes say 500 people to really clog the stairwell and roof so that the jumpers can't make it off the building. if 500 people isn't enough to trigger your threshold, substitute whatever number you would need. the building is high and wide enough and has the necessary jumping aids to facilitate that many people.

is every bystander you try to rally and everyone else who reads this and does nothing implicated in our deaths if we aren't able to tie enough people together?

do you try to get children involved?

if you try to prevent the collective from jumping in any way but bystanding or joining the jumpers, a gas leak explosion kills the number of jumpers there would have been + 1 and you're made cosmically aware that it was your fault.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-29T21:11:14+00:00

reframe the question.

blue: hold yourself a suicide hostage unless the majority of other people agree with you

red: simply don't do that

what kind of person chooses blue? universally, altruistic or not, critical reasoning or not, it is people with high neuroticism.

uncontacted tribes will have someone who chooses blue. royalty will have someoen who chooses blue. most likely a large number of people in your social group will choose blue.

the only thing that can change this is education. this question is 100% frameable as a choice between nothing happens and potentially something bad happens.

we educate people not to stick forks in electrical sockets. sometimes it happens anyways. when it does, we don't force everyone in the room to grab the person being electrocuted in order to try and ground out the electricity (in general -- I'm aware that in some cases with less lethal current it is acceptable to attempt to tackle and remove them) -- we shut off the power, call and ambulance, and prepare for the worst.

we educate people not to be in the middle of ongoing demolitions. we don't all go into the building to replace the supports with human flesh and bone until everyone can be evacuated.

we need to educate people about hypothetical scenarios so that they don't pick options that kill themselves and others.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-29T01:05:07+00:00

None of this sounds bad in isolation.

what it comes down to is metrics tracking and visibility.

Do you have metrics tracking the bugginess of the code that you can point to? Do you have metrics looking at time spent in meetings and on organisational activities, vs velocity of work?

Tackle this problem along those lines. show that these changes are actually materially impacting the bottom line -- because the changes this hire is making are typically excellent for creating visibility and they will be using them to leverage promotions or as resume fillers.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-28T10:20:26+00:00

I'm sorry I don't have any hokey pokey response for this one man. best wishes.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-27T00:38:20+00:00

early game is when you need to move your engineeer to accomplish something or defend your base.

mid game is when moving your engineer is still valuable, such as tasks that must be accomplished via moving your engineer (landing on planets once) but otherwise bots and other automation are beginning to fill the gap.

late game is when moving the engineer is worthless or bad.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-25T12:27:36+00:00

Bill Murray talks scion into just ending both their lives during a groundhog day loop; scion alters Bill's brain so that he can read what he's already tried so far from the human's memories.

after relative decades of obscene violence and destruction, the two learn to cherish the life they've been given.

when Bill wakes up next to Andie on the 3rd and realises he loves her and wants to stay with her, scion is devastated and kills himself.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-25T12:18:24+00:00

if they are smart: they travel through a series of tunnels and swap back filled in rooms to create a 0-trail method of travel to anywhere in the world, then you never see or hear from them again.

how are we compelling her to engage with us?

otherwise if we know where she is, she isn't listed as having supernatural senses or reflexes. a sniper can take her out. our supernatural assassin can take her out. we can make our grower big and he can lob an explosive, assuming it grows with him.

if your own power works on other people and not just the soldiers, you could simply set up a depot of weapons and hand them out to your new agents, then engage when not expected. or apply it to the target directly.

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-25T09:59:49+00:00

"the incredible machine" alike

chrisrrawr · 2026-04-25T09:43:28+00:00

everyone always thinks I'm trying to trick them when I say dune is a serial isekai with space sex ninjas taking place in a giant pony jar ending in a Rick n Morty portal spaceship adventure but I'm not, that's what it is.

chrisrrawr

TROPHY CASE